Software for note-taking?

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I'm looking for software that will help me keep my notes from phone calls organized. I work as a sales manager and spend a large part of every day on the phone with my salespeople. In the course of our conversations, they'll often drop an unfamiliar name or tidbit of information - a new grant, say, or a dynamic colleague we might want to work with. I note these things down in my notebook, but sometimes struggle to retrieve later when it's appropriate.

Is there some kind of software for the PC that can take these fragments of information and aggregate them and make them searchable, like Gmail does with email? That way when I'm looking for a new sales person in Ohio, I can instantly call up the recommendation my colleague gave me two years ago.

My STRONG recommendation is Evernote. It is easily searchable both by tags (that you determine) or simply by querying your total database of text. Evernote is also a great repository for audio notes (and there are services available that transcribe said notes and post them in text form), photos and web-clippings. I use it every day, and I add to the ways it proves valuable almost daily.

Evernote is my favorite for taking notes. It syncs across all your computers and phones, and does it quietly in the background. There is a a Web clipping app for Firefox and Chrome that takes a snapshot of the webpage and saves it as a note. Notes can have multiple tags, and store in multiple notebooks. Notes can be shared via Facebook, Twitter, and email. Add-on apps make the program even more useful, by personalizing the functionality. And the basic version is free!

Evernote is my fave. Chrome browser plug-ins, Clip to Evernote and Clearly are great. You can throw anything at it and sort it. Great with the newer range of small, document scanners to file various cards, recpts, invoices, etc. and voice & photo note captures.
Since I use a desk top at work, and one at home, and transport a combination of smart phone, iPad, and/or laptop, Evernote keeps them all in synch and updated. Filing system is plenty robust and search function works great. Basic version got me hooked, now I use it for so many things that I had to get into the purchase territory. Have not regretted it.

Add that Evernote can be made to recognize text in images -- so if you snap a photo of a receipt, or a business card, or a page of a book with a passage you'd like to reference later, you can search for text in those images, with fair success, ever if you never got around to tagging, labeling, and sorting such images.

In other words, you'll end up using Evernote for purposes beyond the specific one you now have in mind.

If you need only text Simplenote can't be beat. Evernote is awesome but there's additional baggage that comes with it's flexibility in managing PDFs, images, and so on.

Simplenote has a web client, can sync with desktop apps (for example Notational Velocity on the Mac, ResophNotes on Win, there are others), has native iOS clients for iPhone/iPad. The interface is pared down to the minimum. The search is instantaneous, blindingly fast.

I'm going to go against the grain here a little bit. I love Microsoft's OneNote. It has a slew of impressive features and greatly facilitates note-taking and organization. I also like how I can "print to OneNote" and "copy to OneNote" and it automatically provides citations for that.
As a technical consultant and 3+ projects at a time (plus internals and personal projects), I love it.

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